Keeping the postal service up & running, one stamp at a time. Usually silly, sometimes cranky, occasionally a mix of the two.

Month: April 2017

Two of my favorites would be at the bottom center of this scan, because I love Pig-Pen & Franklin. Of course, the 2nd one in on the row above that is great, too. And the 3rd & 4th ones in the row above that. And all the rest of them, as well!

Unless you are viewing this on a phone, I think it’s safe to say each of these little cards are smaller than they appear on your screen. My friend tells me what they are:

“HANAFUDA. It’s one of cards game in Japan. Honestly, I have never played it. Moreover, I’m not sure how to play.”

This is most of the cards, but not all of them; I only laid them out until my scanner glass was full. I took a couple of shots of the box, too:

Aren’t they beautiful? Here’s what I’d like to do: FRAME THEM. I’d take them to a framing service, but every time I do that, it costs an awful lot of money. Do you have any framing tips for these? I’ve only scratched the surface of online search results, as I write this.

My friend’s note was written on this postcard…

And she bought the gift at Snoopy Town–something we just don’t have here in the U.S.

Her packages always look so nice:

Cool, huh? Remember, if you have hanafuda-framing tips, I can’t wait to know about them!

Hey, look at this travel poster-themed card from Cindi in Hawaii! She tells me the art is by Nick Kuchar, who I see has been doing some good work over there for a little while now.

Some more beautiful art now, this one an original piece made for me by a swap-botter in Pennsylvania for a “Earth Day Upcycle Postcard Swap.” She really got into the theme! She tells me:

“I’ve always loved this holiday. I was president of my school’s ecology club, and now I spend a lot of time hiking and camping in nature. I want future generations to enjoy the same beautiful places as well.”

The line about hiking in nature reminds me of my Facebook friend who always posts a status of “taking a walk” when he is at a mall.

Next up is Hello Kitty, who of course–as you know, if you follow the news–is not a cat. That’s from Japan via Postcrossing Forum, and I’m not going to transcribe the message, because it’s part of the scan down at the bottom of this post. Some fun sticker work there, too!

The big red star is a regular Postcrossing card, sent to me from Moscow, Russia by someone living there for the last 5 years. She says she was born in Belarus. Her member registration is BY–meaning she still tells Postcrossing that she lives in Belarus, and thus officially, I received this card from Belarus. But I didn’t.

I love that not-snowman beach scene, from a Postcard United member in Jeju Island, South Korea! She tells me the writing on the card translates to “I hope your dreams come true. Keep it up.”

The Mount Hood card was sent to me from the Medford, Oregon area for a swap-bot “recycled postcard” swap, in which we were to slap a new backing on a card we’d received & send it to our swap partner. Now, when I do this, I grab a chunk of cardboard (usually from a stamp order), glue it to the back, & cut it to size. Very chunky, heavy, & inelegant. This sender had some sort of thin white sticker printed with “POSTCARD” across the top, “Please deliver to” on the address side, and “This card handstamped by _________” on the bottom of the message side. I can see through the sticker that there is writing underneath–but I can’t see it all that well. I guess I should scan this side of the card so you can see exactly what I’m talking about, but it’s early in the morning as I write this portion of this entry, I’m curled up on the end of the couch with my 1st cup of coffee, and I’m feeling too lazy. This takes up too much of my time, anyhow! In my thank-you message to the sender, I suggested I’d like to know about the special (lightweight) backing–but now word back as of yet. Do you think she designed it herself to print on some Avery sticker paper?

Pooh is from Taiwan, via a Postcrossing Forum tag trade. Scroll down to enjoy a whole lot of wonderful stamps!

The two recipe cards here arrived blank, in an envelope, along with a signature written in an odd Easter card (no message, just “Happy Easter!,” a signature, & Postcard United ID). It was sent to me from Chicago, Illinois. What? I thought we were only supposed to receive cards from other countries! Consarn it. Well, I know there are people who would like to receive these cards. In fact, I’ve already mailed one out–but those details can wait for a future post.

It’s too easy for me not to keep track of the cards I send, so right now I’ll do the difficult thing, and make note of them (while I still remember, somewhat).

These first two cards (and several of each, by the way) were part of the stash I acquired a few days ago while hitting the state map card jackpot. Since they are not state map cards, though, I didn’t share them when I wrote about the experience.

Morro Bay is a pretty good place to see sea otters.

The sea otters are working their way toward Hong Kong, and the Morro Bay card toward Sagamihara, Kanagawa, Japan. It doesn’t show in my scan, but the flowers & the lettering in the latter card are covered in glitter. It’s kind of awful, and I really don’t know if I even noticed it at the gas station where I was making my purchase, excited as I was to be filling my hands with dozens & dozens of state map cards so many Postcrossers seem to covet. The recipient this time around wanted flowers & scenery, and I’m hoping she won’t mind a little glitter along with those things. Would you?

This diner scene was chosen by a Postcrosser in Köln, Germany, in a “you can choose” thread.

Hey, I just noticed that row of PEZ dispensers along the ceiling! Scanning technology is awesome.

I just received this multi-image Belfast card a short time ago, and now it’s off for Sofia, Bulgaria in a swap-bot “recycled postcard” swap, in which we were to put a new back on a card we’d received.

I REALLY like that piece of fish art. If I were to visit Belfast, I’d certainly have to go & see that big fish.

The recipient of this card, her profile–well, it’s only a list of wants & don’t wants (leaving me very little to write about–I chose a few lines about the card itself & its provenance), headed by the line–in bold–“I collect only NEW postcards with a REAL photograph on them!” This very heading makes me wonder why she wants to enter this swap for a no-longer-new-card. The good news is, once of her big “wants” is touristy card (but she doesn’t like fish, so I may be eviscerated), so I mail this off with fingers crossed. Oh, swap-bot, why are you so swap-botty?

Next up is a food package postcard headed for a medical student in Tokorozawa, Saitama, Japan. Maybe she will become the doctor who is able to develop a vaccine preventing Cap’n Crunch from tearing up the roofs of peoples’ mouths.

Even if that never comes to pass, though, this Postcrosser already won me over with this set of horrors she hopes to never find in her mailbox:

Another cereal, another food package tag, another country: this chocolatey panel went out to Seoul, South Korea.

Getting into some older, previously-unlogged stuff now… I think they are both regular Postcrossing draws, but what do I know? The indoor swimming pool from Hearst Castle went off to Taipei, Taiwan, and the bear should have ended up in Tokyo, Japan.

Okay, neither of the roads I’m talking about–officially California State Route 1 and U.S. Route 101–are part of the Interstate system, but let’s not facts get in the way of a decent title.

I written a few times here about my complete failure to find any California map cards to replenish my depleted stock. I see in people’s profiles & tag requests that map cards are often what they want, but recent trips to areas such as Monterey and the state’s northern coast have netted me absolutely nothing. Well, a whirlwind day trip to San Luis Obispo County after a short morning work shift earlier this week put me in the pink again, state card-wise!

I think I ended up with over 80 cards, buying multiples of these and a couple of others that bear photos. I bought them at three places where I usually buy postcards in the area: a tiny “super” market, a Rite Aid, and–the primary source, as always–a gas station!

The best news, considering the quantity I’ve purchased, is the price: I bought more than 60 at the gas station, and those were 35 cents each. Expensive! I mean, at the Rite Aid, where I bought fewer than 30 (I think), they were only 25 cents!

From somewhere in the U.S.: I love this Ghostbusters postcard, torn from a toy box for a swap-bot “up-cycled cardboard” trade. I opposite-of-love the lack of a message; all the sender wrote was “I hope you enjoy my postcard! HAVE A GREAT DAY!” This is a postcard with a story, and I wish the sender had told a bit of that.

From Japan: Hey, those look like Bugles! Bugles, the snack–have you had them? I can’t remember the last time I have, but this makes me want some. Anyhow, the card came to me via a Postcrossing Forum food package postcard tag, and the sender writes:

“This is one of my favorite snacks. It’s made of corn. I like its crisp texture. You can see ‘TONGARI CORN’ at the bottom of the card. ‘TONGARI’ means cone. So, the name of the snack is ‘Cone Corn!’ It is simple and funny, isn’t it?! =)”

See how exceptionally easy it is to come up with something to say on a postcard created from a package?

From Russia: (from the same tag) That yellow panel from a cereal box, if you turned it over, you would see the sender wrote so much that there was almost no room to include my mailing address, which was jammed down into the lower-right corner of the card. Here’s just a little bit of the message:

“I adore the packaging of products and my room is full of these things. I have nowhere to put them, but I can’t throw out another box or jar. It seems this is a disease! This packaging is from a cereal called ‘Rye Balls.’ I bought these balls when I first went to the fair in my town last December. They help me out when I have no time to cook breakfast. Do you like graphic novels? ‘Blacksad‘ by Juan Diaz Canales & Juanjo Guarnido conquered my heart. I had to read on the internet, but at the end of 2015, it was published in Russian. I was so glad!”

That was only about half of the message. You know, it’s all about having something to read when you flip over that card.

From Dalview, Gauteng, South Africa: That ice cream bar looks pretty good–though I would choose one with chocolate ice cream! The sender tells me about it:

“We absolutely love the Choc Pie ice cream. Mind you, I love any ice cream. I even eat ice cream in the winter.”

Well, winter is THE best time to eat ice cream! After all, it’s loaded with fat, to warm you up.

I especially like this next set of 3 postcards. This structure is artistic & gorgeous. It’s from China, and the sender tells me it’s a “traditional house…but most of them are become tourist places.”

From the Netherlands, the reading man:

“I chose this card because I liked the image of this man. He has obviously read so much that the letters come off of the pages. I love to read! Mostly sci-fi and fantasy. Terry Pratchett is one of my favorite authors.”

Terry Pratchett is wonderful! I’m overdue to read another of his books.

Oh, look at those fierce piranhas. The sender is in North Carolina, and tells me:

“I visited Myrtle Beach last summer. The aquarium was unique. My favorite part was the jellyfish section. They changed colors. The alligator adventure animal park was awesome, too. We also got our picture taken with two tigers and a monkey…”

Okay, that doesn’t sound like conservation.

From Germany, pancakes. This Postcrosser writes:

“…I love cooking, baking, and good food. The word on the front of the card means “enjoy!’ My favorites are Spanish, Italian, and Japanese food, and of course, the German food made by my mother.”

From Russia: the snow scene is from a brand-new Postcrosser–he tells me this is his first card! And other than that, a great expanse of snowy-white space surrounding his bit of a message. I hope he will learn. It’s the folks who have been Postcrossing or bot-swapping for years, and still can’t manage a message, who make me wonder.

I love that huge fish art installation on the bottom row of the Belfast card. This came to me from Ireland, of course, and the sender tells me this is where he spent “the holidays.”

Okay, it’s finally time to look at the stamps. There’s a sideways stamp, from China, showing some flying cranes. Very nice.

As usual, I’m behind in logging my sent cards, to the point where I can no longer identify everything correctly. Let’s knock some out now, starting with a few that I’m just sending out this very week, and then I’ll work my way back a bit. This still leaves more in the backlog. I’m afraid my blog is no longer completist, if it ever was. Let’s do this. Most of these cards went out in Postcrossing Forum tags.

Two cards from the Monterey Bay Aquarium: the two otters went off to Kita-ku, Kobe, Japan, and the exterior view is on its way to Tianjin, China.

I noticed I had zero traveling cards on Postcard United, & just one on Postcrossing, so I clicked on “send a card” on both of those services. The view of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea goes to Untermünkheim, Germany, to a brand-new Postcrosser (2 weeks in) who hasn’t even bothered to create a profile yet. I grabbed a card that would give me something to say (in short, love the Big Island of Hawaii; don’t care for snow, so only gaze up at it from the warm below).

The Matisse image is going to Hong Kong, to a VERY prolific Postcard Uniter: in less than 3 years on the site, she has somehow managed to send out 3,027 cards! Through some odd injustice, though, she has only received 2,228 cards to date.

More recycled cardboard: I like that I was able to provide the person I tagged in Niigata, Japan, with an entire word search (hewn from the back of a box of cereal).

Oh my gosh, this card–another one from the infamous (to me, at least) Disappointassortment. It went to Berlin, Germany–and it was actually on that Postcrosser’s wall of favorites!

I decided I needed to do what the producers of the card did not bother to: identify this clock tower. After some amount of web searching & comparing images, I came up with the determination that it is Old Town Hall in Prague, Czech Republic.

Last up is an envelope that I sent off to Zaandam, Netherlands. Just the envelope, because I can’t remember what card was inside. Well, I think I know what card was inside, because I don’t often get a request to send a card in an envelope–and I don’t always comply. But let’s focus on the envelope, which I made from an ad for…something. I think it’s for the butterflies at San Francisco’s Cal Academy of Sciences.

Okay, time for all of the stamps, stamps, stickers, washi tape, etc. What did you like this time around?

Lots of reuse/recycling/upcycling going on around here lately! I sent out these cards in a number of upcycling-related swap-bot & Postcrossing Forum rounds.

I made these stamp cards months & months ago (and have shared them here), utilizing some of my most-unwanted cards from the disappointassortment I made the mistake of purchasing. I sent these two off to Mounds View, Minnesota; and North Conway, New Hampshire.

This mock meat product was just awful–and I have zero aversion to faux meats–the product was just bad. The package makes a fun postcard, though! Off it went to Tottori, Japan.

Milk-Bones & Canada Dry going to recipients in Universal City and Houston, Texas.

This morning–and I don’t know why this happened–I opened my front door to find this on my doorstep:

I don’t know how this beluga got where it was–it might have swam there, as it was raining all night. Oh, and it’s not the photo part of this card I saw first; it was message-side up:

It’s amazing to me how this scan underplays how very smudged this card is. Apparently my scanner needs to be calibrated, or something. Do you see all the faded color behind the purple lettering? Imagine it twice as dark. And smudgey.

So many questions go through my mind:

How DID this come to be on my front porch, about 14 inches from my door, exposed to the rain?

Why did whomever brought it to me not drop it in my mail slot?

Why did the sender (this came, you may have noticed, from Germany via Postcard United) write in colored ink on a floral field? Colored inks are problematic.

And why did that sender write part of that message across the address information?

Between numbers 3 & 4, I don’t really know what’s going on. I mean, even the part of the message I CAN read–I just don’t know what’s going on.

I never know what’s going on.

I’ll assume, I guess, that the sender didn’t even know that the purple pen was filled with water-soluble ink. And of course, the person didn’t know the card would be left on my semi-rainy front step–BUT–one can assume that any postcard, on its journey, may well encounter a bit of water on a floor, in a postal box, on a thumb–or something.

I use a water-resistant, fast-drying black-inked pen, and I always regret when I end up using a different pen. Since joining the snail mail revolution, I’ve started buying these pens (which I learned about in a Mental Floss interview with a pen guy of some sort) in bulk. It’s actually about time I ordered a 3rd box of 12.

Not so long ago, this postcard from China dropped through my mail slot, thanks to Postcard United.

Oh, how nice. It was when I turned it over that I did a triple-take.

Well, this is a first! The official language of Postcard United (and Postcrossing) is English (how very convenient for us native English-speakers). While I’ve received many cards with a word or several in the sender’s native tongue, I’d never received a card with NO English (“Happy Postcard United” doesn’t count)!

Off I went in search of an app that might do a visual translation for me. That found, I took a shot of the card’s message, & sent it through:

Did you catch that? Let’s review:

I… don’t think that was a good translation. And you ought to have heard the app speak it out!

I decided to post the pic of the card on Facebook, since I know a lot of Chinese-speakers. One Taiwan-born friend reported back:

This is my rough translation from the poem:

I am like a bird in a forest, struggling to free myself towards the sky, boldly spread my shoulders and close my eyes, distant horizon is only short steps away, I am just like that tiny bird in a forest, without existence and aiming for the moon, my wings are stained in blood and any setback will not stop me from flying higher.

Oh, a poem!

I thanked my friend, who said “I am glad my grade 8 Chinese came in handy.”

Lots of fun stuff this time around, from postal pals, Postcrossing Forum, Postcard United, & swap-bot! It was an amazing day last week, when I reached into my mailbox to find THREE Snoopy cards! They’re all so great.

This big Mickey card arrived on the same day. He’s pretty awesome, too. I opted to receive this card in a Postcrossing Forum “you choose” tag. The sender lives in Germany, and she tells me:

“I’m a big Disney fan (especially of the old ‘classics’ like Beauty & the Beast, Pocahontas, & Aladdin.”

I like those movies too, but I call them modern classics, having been a grown-up by the time they came out!

I wonder whether that deer know that Hello Kitty is not a kitty. It’s confusing.

Don’t miss the back of these cards! Cindi creates a beautiful Peanuts overload–and I love that Krazy Kat stamp!

Kitten & bird stamps! Chipmunk sticker!

Do you have any favorites here? I sure do! Well, practically all of them.